About the Power Being Down
Greetings, darkness-traveling hitchhikers!
Today, or rather, tonight, since it got dark in the middle of the afternoon, was an odd day. Every frigging time that there's a power outage around here, I always find myself thinking that I could've prepared myself better. Sometimes it's just an irrational thought; other times, like today, it's actually something to think about. My emergency lights were not charged enough, so I only could use them for reading for half an hour, before having to spend the precious battery on my cellphone.
I think only since the energy went down, around six hours ago, I've read almost 100 pages of my dear "Life, the Universe, and Everything", the third book in the five-book-trilogy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've stated it a few days ago, but it's been really great to reread it once more in its original language. But yeah, even I was a bit tired of it when I stopped.
This rain that poured today did not last an hour, but had winds of more than 90 km/h (which is around 58 mph, for my American-hitchhiker friends) roaring and making the rain fall almost sideways. It was enough to put more than 300 thousand households in the dark, around all of the expanded metropolitan region of São Paulo. It was so chaotically strong, that even my 5G was struggling to connect; most of the time I only had one bar of connection, if any.
It's been a little over an hour since the power has returned, luckily just in time for me to enter the final meeting of my Monday. I'm here writing after finishing it, since apparently verbalizing words into this blockchain has been a great way to spend my time recently.
This episode helped me reflect on how much we take things for granted. I've been working mostly from home with AI recently, so I obviously had to cut my workday short today. And even more obviously, I can only work when there's energy flowing in the electrical grid of our house, and something as quick as a half-hour rain made it impossible for me to work. And without the 5G connection, not even through my phone I was able to connect to the Internet properly.
I found myself... bored.
Boredom is a feeling that we're not as used to experiencing anymore, due to our little electronic portals to the Internet that we keep inside our pockets most of the time. Therefore, I invite you to try and take some minutes off the connectivity we live entangled with, and try to experience being alive and breathing a bit. Try to focus on your inhales and exhales, counting up to 10 breathing cycles. If you can only manage 5, or even 3, try to find within yourself the will to celebrate it. Every small win counts.
Practicing mindfulness is everything but simple, so we have to be proud of ourselves for even trying. Or better, we always have to be proud of ourselves for trying. To this effect, maybe try to be proud of yourself right now for something you've achieved in this lifetime. You're worth the energy and time to rake care of yourself, and of others. Only together we can make this world a better place (: